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karthik_r085 writes "According to The Register, An Irish graduate student has uncovered words blacked-out of declassified US military documents using nothing more than a dictionary and text analysis software. Claire Whelan, a computer science student at Dublin City University was given the problems by her PhD supervisor as a diversion. David Naccache, a cryptographer with Gemplus, challenged her to discover the words missing from two documents: one was a memo to George Bush, and another concerned military modifications to civilian helicopters."

The government has already proven it will detain people just for what they know, without criminal charge, without provocation, without family access, without legal representation, without regard for international criticism, without regard for international laws and norms, without safeguards for personal safety, without justification or oversight by the courts.

I doubt the G goons will be sweeping up this particular researcher, but what small and subtle distinction really lies between this case and others? What shred of humanity protects her from the inhumanity of the Bush/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft three-ring circus? Oh, she has red hair and freckles? Alrighty then.

Big difference, beheading and detaining. but then War is hell. Best to hope the next missile doesn't fly up your ass or perhaps you would best fight the war with tea and more BS.

I'll explain the difference for you.

One is a sick and disgusting act by a few individuals who lack the ability to turn their anger into something constructive. The other is a violation of international law and generally recognized human rights condoned by a government who doesn't want to talk about what those terrorists and the

Oh, boo hoo. Just because a couple of idiots from South Armagh decide to drive a truck filled with fertiliser into Canary Wharf doesn't mean that they had *any* support from people in the Republic. Northern Irish terrorism is a particularly insular phenomenon which by and large has no greater connection with people in the Republic than it does with those in the mainland UK.

Take a representative sample of Irish people and ask them whether they want stronger economic and social ties with the United Kingdom or a reunited Ireland, and I can guarantee that over two-thirds will say they want better ties to the UK.

The idiots in the North are no more representative of Irish culture or political identity than those in the UK's BNP.

Also, considering the political state of Northern Ireland (which is part of Great Britain, etc.) last year, most of these terrorist groups have just become glorified drug gangs, since a major way they go their money was through the drug cartel, now with a cease fire, there is more infighting and killing between the protestant militant groups over drug issues, than between the catholic and protestant groups.

"The first task is to identify the font, and font size the missing word was written in. Once that is done, the dictionary search begins for words that fit the space, plus or minus three pixels"

This is why I don't work for an intelligence agency. On the other hand, I'm still probably better qualified than people who think blacking out a few words in a document strips them of contextual information...

how righteous of you. in fact, if you look and know a little about intelligence analysis techniques, i think you'll find that the NSA already know about this approach for 'interpreting' typewritten redacts, even as far back as the 50's.

what this story really seems to point out is the naivete of a lot of people about computers, and the powerful simplicity to seemingly difficult problems that they offer... the average consumer.

it wasn't so long ago that the idea of having massive dictionaries in ram and font and calculations on this order to make a practical approach was considered relatively 'resource difficult'.

but moores laws and fry's electronics has certainly changed that.

for the price of a nice night out, i could buy an extra computer for brute-force hacks against any target, stick it in my closet and forget about it. used to be, not so long ago you had to have a halon system and power room to do things like that...

how righteous of you. in fact, if you look and know a little about intelligence analysis techniques, i think you'll find that the NSA already know about this approach for 'interpreting' typewritten redacts, even as far back as the 50's.

I just wish the intelligence community and their unintelligent sycophants the press would stop using redact [onelook.com] to mean elide [onelook.com].

Especially as a noun, because a "typewritten redact" is like a copy editor with ink hammered onto him, somewhere.

Why do they have to release the original documents with original sections blocked out?

Why not just release retyped docs with placeholders for blocked out sections.

For instance:

Original:It seems that the president wishes us to bomb the hell out of iraq. He's pissed off that saddam wanted to kill his daddy. also there's the issues of controlling the oil flow, and protecting israel. god forbid anyone thinks that the israilies are the biggest part of the problem out there.

Released with blocks:It seems that XXXXXXXXXXXXX wishes us to bomb the hell out of iraq. He's XXXXXXXXXX that saddam wanted to XXXXXXXXXXXXXX. also there's the XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX the XXXXXXXX, and XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. god forbid XXXXXX thinks that XXXXXXXXXXXXX are the XXXXXXXXXXXX XX XXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

My proposal:It seems that |CLASSIFIED| wishes us to bomb the hell out of iraq. He's |CLASSIFIED| that saddam wanted to |CLASSIFIED|. also there's the |CLASSIFIED| the |CLASSIFIED|, and |CLASSIFIED|. god forbid |CLASSIFIED| thinks that |CLASSIFIED| are the |CLASSIFIED| |CLASSIFIED| |CLASSIFIED| |CLASSIFIED|.

I think this simple step would go a long way towards soving the problem. The process could probably even be automated somewhat by using some type of OCR software on the original blocked out documents.

Is there some law against this? Like that TPTB have to release the original doc?

It sems that |CLASSIFIED| wishes us to bomb the hell out of iraq. He's |CLASSIFIED| that saddam wanted to |CLASSIFIED|. also there's the |CLASSIFIED| the |CLASSIFIED|, and |CLASSIFIED|. god forbid |CLASSIFIED| thinks that |CLASSIFIED| are the |CLASSIFIED| |CLASSIFIED| |CLASSIFIED| |CLASSIFIED|.

Sounds quite like the Nixon transcrpits released during the Watergate investigation, but instead of "classified" there was "expletive deleted" back then.

It seems that |cheeney| wishes us to bomb the hell out of iraq. He's |not convinced| that saddam wanted to |give up all wmd's|. also there's the |belief in the cabinet that| the |american people will fall for the wmd story and never look back|, and |will even go for a cooked up al queda link as well|. god forbid |the UN security council| thinks that |our phony iraq facts| are the |crap that they are| |or else we're going to have to go in there even though we're going to piss off every enemy and friend we have| |lose all integrity as a nation| |and give the whacko terrorists even more popular support in the arab world and more of a reason to set off bombs inside the continental united states|.

On the contrary, the Project for A New American Century [newamericancentury.org] group, a coupla dozen high ranking neocons, CLEARLY outlined what they were going to do once they got in power. It's all on their publically available website. Some of it is in PDF downloads, but it's there. They planned to invade basically the oil producing nations of the middle east, and some others. They got in power, in charge,and wow, they invaded. They also said they needed a "pearl harbor" like event in advance to justify the invasion, and get the US people all enthused around it, and golly gee mother of all coincidences, that event occurred..

I mean, it's real, it's there, you can see the names, the documents, it's written clearly, and the mass controlled media won't hardly ever mention it. I've seen very brief mentions at the best. I have yet to meet anyone in meatspace who has ever heard of them or their documents though. Wonder why that is? And I know it's been posted on slashdot several times, by various people, as well as on literally thousands of other forums and blogs. Radio talk show hosts all over have been clued in, but only a small handful even bother to acknowledge it, let alone come to the obvious conclusions looking at it. Journalists by the thousands have been clued in, yet there's a severe lack of coverage by most of the big names out there.

No I don't blame democrats, or republicans, I blame the US people in general for being so unbelievably stupid and naieve and un-caring for this disaster. We are a nation of sports and entertainment addicts more than anything else. No one gives a crap. They are taught from the time they are toddlers to NOT give a crap. They are taught to parrot one of two party lines that are always essentially complete lies, and to be happy with that, and to never go further than to keep corralled into one of those two parties and to swallow down the 6 o clock news pablum. So they do it, brainwashing since being able to understand human speech is quite effective apparently. They simply refuse to learn from history,and they refuse to acknowledge reality, and that's why we generation after generation keep getting hosed. You are force fed you are either a liberal-democrat, or a conservative-republican and that is SUCH A LOAD OF CRAP. I am so amazed people keep falling into that trap.

but I've been looking at that site, and haven't found too much alarming stuff, speaking as a life-long, well-traveled american. Their principles are clearly stated... do you think other nations don't have groups strategically plotting their future course? The difference in America is that you can go on a website, see the players, and read what they have to say. My cursory perusal didn't turn up much objectionable material. Can you point me to some specific papers and/or citations? I'm genuinely curious.

I also never found a position paper advocating a conquest of the middle east and theft of their oil. For pity sake, americans want to buy the mideast's oil, not seize it (if the US military seriously wanted to take it, there'd be little to stop them... but that's not how americans see themselves on the world stage).

One can attempt to argue whether American prominence is good for the world... but I would challenge you to put forth a better choice (China? Russia? Iran?). It's the nature of world affairs for the dominant powers to emerge... I would also submit to you that "the United Nations" is not an appropriate alternative... the UN's lack of action has resulted in much pain and suffering around the world, and their ludicrous committee appointments (Sudan and Cuba in the human rights group, for example) bring the credibility of that body into serious doubt.

The US is the "big boy" on the block, and an easy target for derision... but on the whole I'd consider the US a force for good in the world... our track record in confronting various evils, and settling/winning various wars and conflicts speaks for itself.

Granted, whether we have the political will to make Iraq work out remains to be seen. We certainly have the physical ability, but unfortunately that's not america's achilles heel... it's politics.

"The US is the "big boy" on the block, and an easy target for derision... but on the whole I'd consider the US a force for good in the world... our track record in confronting various evils, and settling/winning various wars and conflicts speaks for itself."

Keep telling yourself that. Its simply not true. Chat with the average person in Iran, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, Haiti, Dominican Republic, the Phillipines.

The Phillipines endured a brutal, genocidal occupation by the U.S. from the end of the Spanish American war up to World War II. After World War II the U.S. backs the massively corrupt rule of the Marcos regime. I'll post this same link I post everytime an American says how good they've been to the world:

http://www.isp.nwu.edu/~fprefect/politics/timeli ne.html

Some parts of it are overdone and a stretch but it has all the names and dates for all the misery the U.S. has inflicted on the world in the last century which you can corroborate easily if you choose to not believe this source.

In 1953 Iranian Nationalists gained power at a time when the British were looting 88% of Iran's oil revenues. The Iranians demanded a more equitable deal and offered the British 25%. Blockeds and boycotts ensued. The British ran crying to the U.S. and Truman. Truman ignored them. When Eisenhower took power it happened the Dulles brothers, head of the CIA and Secretary of State were lawyers form Anglo-American oil. The Dulles brothers used the CIA to topple the Iranian government and installed the Shah of Iran, who was every bit as despotic as Saddam was as far as the secret police, torture and disappearing people went. Rather than giving the British their oil contracts back they were given to, you guessed it, American oil companies. The reason the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized was revenge for all the misery the U.S. inflicted on Iran under the Shah.

This also points out that the U.S. has in fact been using its military and intelligence power to win control of oil fields for American companies since World War II at least. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because the U.S. was embargoing Japan's access to U.S. controlled oil fields in Indonesia.

To date control of oil fields has been primarily for the economic benefit of the seven sisters(the big oil companies formed from the break up of Standard Oil though there are a lot less than seven now thanks to mergers). They have immense influence in U.S. politics, especially on the Republican's. George H.W. Bush's main career before politics was at Zapata Oil which built off shore oil rigs and ships to do contract drilling for the big oil companies and many foreign governments. Its widely suspected Zapata was also a CIA front, since there ships tended to be parked just offshore of every hotspot in the world. Zapata is also a key factor in the closeness of the Bush family to the royal families in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Halliburton's oil operations closely resemble those of Zapata.

In the future as oil reserves start to run out strategic control of the oil fields will determine the economic winners and losers of this century at least until somebody comes to their senses and starts investing billions in developing alternative energy sources instead of fighting over the current fossil fuel sources.

China's oil consumption in particular is exploding at double digit annual percentage growth and its a contibutor to the current tight oil market. The Neocons are in fact looking ahead to when the day there isn't enough oil to meet demand. When that day comes they will look pretty smart when they have the U.S. military sitting in the middle of all the old oil fields in the Middle East and all the new ones in Central Asia. When that day comes some people will get the oil their economies need and some nations will go dark.

"Let's see, the U.S. freed the Phillipines from a Spanish tyranny and rather than subsuming the islands, the U.S. eventually set them off on their own."

The U.S. did subsume the Phillipines for about 90 years. It wasn't until 1986 when Marcos was toppled and 1992 when the U.S. removed its huge military bases that it achieved something resembling real sovereignty.

Apparently you've never read the history of the initial American occupation of the Phillipines. The U.S.replaced Spanish tyranny with American tyranny.

U.S. Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States."Major Littleton W. T. Waller: How young?Smith: Ten years and up.--Exchange on October 1901, quote from the testimony at Smith's court martial by the New York Evening Journal (May 5, 1902). General Smith, a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre, was popularly known as "Hell Roaring Jake" or "Howling Wilderness".

The civilian causalties as the U.S. fought the Phillipine insurgency was most probably in the hundreds of thousands.

"Most of the mideast prior to the actions of western oil companies were vaste wastelands traversed by ignorant nomads. The western oil companies discovered the oil, gave it value, and it then was stolen by the disgusting murderers that call themselves governments in the mideast."

Are you American, British or Israeli. Thank you for once again proving what an arrogant, imperialistic, bunch Westerners are. Some of the "murders that call themselves governments" are close friends of the Bush family and the best of allies of the U.S., the Saudi royal family, the Emir of Kuwait, etc. Either your respect the sovereignty of nations or you don't. If you think a western company can enter a country and take all its resources with little or no compensation to the country which owns the resources you are a blatant imperialist.

Mossadegh. The head of Iran the U.S. overthrew was Time "Man of the Year", fairly progressive, anti-communist and Truman wouldn't even consider overthrowing him, the Dulles brothers on the other hand could care less when there was a chance to seize control of Iran's oil for U.S. oil companies.

Not sure how well you are versed in history but Iraq sits on top of the cradle of civilization. There were great civilizations there when your Western ancestors were living in caves or sod huts and running around in animal skins.

The number system you use today, though possibly Indian in origin, was introduced to the West by Arabs. They have had rich civilizations, great empires, and some of the world's best scholars. There have been periods when Arab culture was far more advanced than Europe's.

Many of the misfortune's of the Arab world can be traced to military interventions from the West, including the Romans, the Crusades, British imperialism and now U.S. imperialism.

"They are now characterized by illiteracy, poverty, religious fanatism and government oppression. Western societies are characterized by high rates of literacy, greater wealth, more even distibution of wealth, rule of law, and rapid technological advance, a high degree of social mobility and individual social and economic freedom. As a result Arabs have become jealous and emittered, despiratley recounting ancient greatness to preserve a lingering pride in their failed civilizations."

Are you suggesting the U.S. is entering its decline?

I hate to break it to you but "illiteracy, poverty, religious fanaticism and government oppression" could pretty easily be used to describe the trend in the U.S. today though it certainly hasn't reached epidemic proportions in all categories yet. I'm pretty nervous with the the extent to which fundamentalist Christianity has inserted itself into the Bush administration. Everyone has their right to religious preference but they should be leaving it at the home and in the church when they enter government. The Founding Father emphasized the separation of church and state because many of them were well aware of religious persecution in Europe at the time.

As for you ramblings about first mover advantage I don't really see the point. All civilizations rise and fall. So will American and Western European civilization, fall that is. You seem pretty eager to condemn China to the dustbin of greatness but all indications are that today they are a juggernaut that will pass the U.S., E.U. and Japan in economic supremacy, at least, and in the not to distant future.

"From those facts you nonsensically conclude that Romans are partly accountable for Arab misfortune and the relative ascenadancy of the west. Europeans were ultimately defeated in the crusades by Arabs."

On this point I conceede and punt. Arab history is so complex and poorly understood by this Westerner I'll have to admit I have no clue how they reached the nadir they did in the early 20th century.

The US is the "big boy" on the block, and an easy target for derision... but on the whole I'd consider the US a force for good in the world... our track record in confronting various evils, and settling/winning various wars and conflicts speaks for itself.

When G W Bush was a candidate, his way of speaking used to set my teet on edge: kind of a rote, up and down sing-sing reading of the teleprompter. He doesn't do that since 9/11: he speaks with the true conviction of a man who is convinced he has a personal mission.

I liked the old way better. The new Bush is frightening.

I would love it if the US were a force for good in the world. But I dont' believe that as a nation we know enough about the rest of the world to decide what is good for them. Freedom; yes. Democracy: yes. I strongly beleive these are good for any people of any culture. However, we don't really understand people in a place like Iraq to effectively promote these ideas. We don't even have national memory of the way these ideas were used in the past as self righteous fig leaf for ruthless exercises in the application of power. Rhetoric that is inspiring to us only reminds them of bitter disappointments in the West going back to Sykes-Picot. The more stirring a project sounds to us, the more it will incite fear and revulsion on the people we plan to impose it upon.

So, I'm very disturbed by any kind of messianic program to drag the unenlightened into accepting our values. What is even worse than telling seductive lies is being seduced by them yourself. In the first case you discredit yourself. In the latter case you discredit yourself and your ideals.

I'd much prefer a policy which frankly pursued our national interests, but tried to do it in a modestly ethical way.

I wasn't advocating an Iron Fisted policy as an ongoing, continuing policy, but something we should have done in the immediate aftermath to both establish our authority and preserve order. It's too late now and would only spiral the conflict way out of control.

The tactics and strategy of occupation are somewhat independant of the reasons or validity for going to war in the first place, as well. I agree that the rationale for going to war was paper thin at best, but whether you or I want it to happen, it'

This SAP (Specal Access Program a.k.a Top Top Secret) was a highly successful program to kill, capture and use exceptional interrogation techniques, especially sexual humiliation tactics, against high value Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. Apparently there is an old book call "The Arab Mind" the neocons are using as their bible on how to interrogate Arabs.

Unfortunately Rumsfeld and his deputy Cambone decided to apply the same techniques on taxi drivers in the prisons in Iraq. They went from using highly secure interrogation sites to a big insecure prison in the middle of Iraq. They went from using highly trained, disciplined and cleared special forces to do the interrogation to untrained, undisciplined Army reservists(ordinary people). The CIA was so disgusted with Rumsefeld and Cambone's efforts they withdrew, both because they knew the secrecy would be blown thanks to DOD sloppiness and they ethically objected in taking these extra legal tactics from use on top Al Qaeda, who probably deserve it, to Iraqi prisoners in a conventional war. The Army's own number suggest 60% of the Iraqi prisoners are wrongfully detained. The Red Cross thinks its more like 70-90%.

All indications are Rumsfeld, Myers, and Cambone are between a rock and a hard place, they either commit perjury in front of Congress by denying knowledge of this project or rat it out and commit treason by exposing a top secret project. George W. is the only one who can declassify the program so the people really responsible are held accountable and that appears to be Rumsfeld, Meyers and Cambone.

If this article is true, and it appears its sourced by people in the CIA and DOD who are exacting revenge on Rumsfeld and Cambone for there arrogance and stupidity then Rumsfeld is flat out lieing when he pretends like he didn't know about what was going on in Iraq and in fact ordered it. Its fundamentally wrong to charge a bunch of reservists, ordinary citizens, for following orders when they implemented this top secret program.

Check the signatories of the PNAC Statement Of Principles [newamericancentury.org] and note the signatures include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and Lewis Libby.

Now read this letter [newamericancentury.org] published on their website in May 1998 :

"

We should establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf - and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power."

The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The document also :

Refers to key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership';

Describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations';

Reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;

Says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has';

Pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world-wide command-and-control system'.

For those that are interested (and that should be every free-thinking person) I've collected a lot more associated evidence which I published in an article [diplo.co.uk] on my website.

Establishing a precedence for preepmtive war.
Now America has bybassed the UN, and global opposition to this
unilateral action. If the will to build an empire arises, then it
will be done without any regard to what the rest of the world think
or say. You can read the following articles too:

Specially interesting is this page in the Project
for the New American Century Statement of Principles [newamericancentury.org] where you
can see who signed this document. Interesting to note that all of
them are either now in the Pentagon (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith,...etc.), or are
aids to Cheney (Libby, Abrams,...etc.)

Construction Contracts. The Infrastructure contracts
for US corporations to rebuild Iraq is a lucrative business. Of
course the Halliburton link has been reported several times (Cheney
used to be its manager or director). The defence spending, plus the contracts should fuel the US economy for a while, or that is what they thought would happen.

As many would notice, Bush is not running the show. Bush is the
ideal front for such an operation. He thinks he is doing the right
thing, and that God has to do something with it. You can see this PBS
program The Jesus Factor [pbs.org].

There are two factions grappling for Bush's attention. The
moderate pragmatics (Powell, Armitage), and the extremist ideologue
(Cheney, his subordinates, Rumsfeld, his subordinates). Powell's
position is almost identical to Shimon Peres when he was the Foreign
Minister in the Sharon government, a rational pragmatic dove amid the
ideologue extremist hawks.

What is funny and sad at the same time, is that the US Foreign policy is now crafted by the Pentagon and the Vice President in accordance with neocon think tanks like the PNAC. No role whatsover is given to the Department of State (where it should really belong), and Powell is merely a messenger (go tell the UN we are doing so and so, try to sell it diplomatically,...etc.). No wonder Powell has said that he will not seek a second term even if Bush gets reelected [washingtonpost.com] (and repeated it a few weeks ago). Not nice thing being in his shoes I guess.

I would not go as far as to say that they intentionally planned and executed the September 11 thing. But the neocons sure did exp

in the US, 50% don't even vote, and in the popular vote it was an almost even split, so only 25% of eligible adult voters elected bush.

Of course, we have an electoral college, they actually decide. It varies state to state how they do that though.

I support "no professional politicians". Single terms for every elected office. No more than 10 years total government service or involvement, and no pensions whatsoever. Medical and survivors bereavement benefits for veterans, or people in current employ only. L

"Critics, mostly from the far-left and the far-right, frequently quote out of context a line from Rebuilding America's Defenses which refers to the possibility of a "catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor" (p. 51), citing this as being suspiciously prescient of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and suggesting that the PNAC or its associates wanted, knew about, or even were involved in the attacks. This quote is considered by some to be part of the evidence of a plot to use the attacks as a pretext for the implementation of their policies. Many even incorrectly claim that the report directly states that this "new Pearl Harbor" is needed to justify war on Iraq. However, a full reading of the text shows it says nothing of the sort. The line is in the middle of a discussion about the military's employment of emerging information technologies, and the report guesses that full transformation to new technologies is likely to be a slow process, absent some "catalyzing" event which would presumably cause the military to upgrade much more quickly."

I suspect there would be a 50/50 chance that the visit from the intelligence goons would be a job offer. US intelligence sorely needs people who can read between the lines and actually come up with correct answers.

The CIA is and was in fine shape. Their analyses were solid. They were correct on every recommendation.

What happened was the insertion of civilian ideologues into the analysis process. They cherry-picked what Bush wanted to hear, disregarded the rest, forced analysts to shut up or resign. On the Wilson matter, they outed the analyst's wife as a CIA agent, crippling a front company and endangering many lives -- just to make sure that any CIA boy who cared to call them liars would know how they would be deal

Obviously, the next step the government will take is to require all documents be written in fixed-width fonts. Either that or they will require that all documents be converted into fixed-width before they are released for FFIA inquiries.

Yes. But knowing 5 letters are in a word doesn't narrow it down nearly as much as knowing the word is 46 pixels long.

Maybe its just me, but the way I see it, is if you know that a word is 5 letters long, then you know its x pixels long (knowing the width of one character and you them all with monospaced). With a variable width font you know the length, but you don't know the number of characters. This means you go from 26^5 permuations, for the previous example, (26^n generally), to how ever many different letters fit in that space. For example 'will' with take up as much space as 'iiill', so you have a combination of multiple powers, in this case (26^4 + 26^5). For longer words you have more possible variations.

iiill would never get chekced, because it isn't in the dicinoairy. What your doing is dividing all the word in a dicionairy into for example 147 catagories (3-150Pixles) instead of say 40 (1-40 letters). Now you do the math from here.

If you're talking about encrypted text, then your point is very valid. However, for English words you can get a much better result by using a dictionary to limit the number of words that fit the pattern.

How many 5 letter words are there in the English language? According to/usr/share/dict/words, there's 9987 words, from aalii to zymin. Compare that to how many combinations of letters add up to 60 pixels? If the letter "i" is 4 pixels -- 3 pixels for the letter, one pixel space after it -- then you *could* guess that the word is "iiiiiiiiiiiiiii". In fact, there's a hell of a lot more possibilities doing it the pixel way, but you can reduce this down by using a dictionary. "iiiiiiiiiiiiiii" isn't in the dictionary. You can also reject outright words that have impossible letter combinations. Three of any letter in a row can be rejected, Q followed by X can be rejected, etc. The rest you do a dictionary lookup to see if they exist.

It'd be an interesting exercise to perform. Luckily for the researcher, the word preceding the blacked out word was "an", which implies that the next word starts with a vowel. So that narrowed it down to only 7 potential words based on pixel length and dictionary lookup, and the one that seemed to work best was Egyptian. However, if all you knew was that it was an 8 letter word beginning with a vowel... you'd be looking at 6089 possibilities (again, according to/usr/share/dict/words and grep).

A fixed-width font (like courier) uses the same width for all characters. A document printed in a fixed-width font would make the process easier, because you would know with certainty how many letters fit into a black box.

If you read the article, the seven words that were found to be a possible fit range from seven to ten characters, implying that the document was printed in a variable width font.

Don't you think that if they had the insight to convert a censored document to fixed width, that they would also make all the blacked-out spaces of the same length, and give NO information to potential cryptographers?

The other way to get around this problem would be to do the blackouts against a digital version of the document, so that the words are all replaced with blocks of equal size without revealing any information about how long the oriignal words were.

So as to counter the terrorists' latest methods for conducting espionage against our great nation, all official documents will now be composed in a combination of Wingdings 3 [identifont.com] and MS Comic Sans [help4web.net].

Although, I would think that this method requires the blacking out to begin and end exactly at the edge of the blacked-out word

plain-text-1 white-space-1 blacked-out-text white space-2 plain-text-2Measure from the end of plain-text-1 to the start of plain-text-2.This includes exactly two white-spaces plus the blacked-out-text.It doesn't matter how accurate the black Sharpie is.

Isn't calling it "The Monde" like calling USA Today "Etats-Unis Today," it is inappropriate to translate the title of a newspaper like that. Call it by its real name "Le Monde," which of course means "The World." But "The World" is not the title of the newspaper.

The student didn't actually solve for any real US secrets, because the documents she was using were already declassified. However, as an academic exercise this demonstrates that there's still information being conveyed in the typical black-out way of "redacting" certain words from documents.

And, since the information was known, we're sure that she did come up with the correct solutions.

Did anyone honestly believe that blacking out certain words was a reliable method of withholding names or information? I think it is usually just done to discourage the discovery of such things, but not with the thought that it is 100% secure. Even the human eye can often figure out what was blacked out.

Nah, I think the US gov should employ more people who can barely write. Misspelled words won't match the word lenght of the correctly spelled word. Using creative grammar would make it harder to find the right word type. And random punctuation would make it harder to find seperate sentences.
Combined we get security through ignorance.

Anyone know if there's a paper on this? This news came up on another site a couple of days ago, but they didn't even mention the researchers name, only implied it was presented at EuroCrypt'2004 [ibm.com] in Switzerland. I looked though the list of accepted papers, but nothing stood out.

A search on IACR will give a single hit [iacr.org] on the author, but it isn't this report/paper/work.

Not hard to understand. TV is 100% entertainment (yes, even the evening news). Watching a fuzzed out image of someone with a messed up voice is very dramatic.. "Look what lengths they've gone to to protect the indentity of this person.. what he's saying must be very juicy.."

Why show a person on TV that obvoiously not want to be recoznized (however carefully concealed by the production)?

That one is easy. It is always better to display the subejct of the story, like the raped in a rape case etc. than to obectify them. The story becomes more interesting and draws a larger crowd. It is also a part of the evidence chain, like interviewing a witness or other part. The viewer get closer to the story, even though i is just a large blob with a strange voice.

If you pixelize the face of a person, he's not recognizeable. But unless he stands completely still, his movements will give enough info to calculate the originating pixels after a couple of minutes.

You have an example of this? something tells me you'll have a very hard time identifying changes in pixelation, like if you took a photograph and moved behind a pixelation mask, and changes in the image itself like lips moving, eyes blinking, turning (X-axis)/lowering & rising (Y-axis)/rolling (Z-axis) his

Another great one that's been in the news lately is doing redaction by drawing black squares over the top of words in a PDF document. The words are still there beneath the black rectangles, sort of like redacting a paper document by using electrical tape. =P

quote of memo to bush from the article:"An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an XXXXXXXX service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike."and from the article itself:"This eliminated all but seven words: Ugandan, Ukrainian, Egyptian, uninvited, incursive, indebted and unofficial. Naccache plumped for Egyptian, in this case."

AH-HAH!so an egyptian operative told an *egyptian* service....man this is some tricky work! uncovering covert secrets for sure!

One way to solve this problem, of course, is to develop a font that constantly varies the size and type so that your document ends up looking like a ransom that's been clipped and pasted from a newspaper.

Well, there are two solutions to this method of cracking. The first is never release classified documents. However, this does not work well in a free and open society.

Nowdays, most, if not all, classified documents are created electronically. Perhaps the source document should be kept in an archive. When it is declassified, they just delete the text needed to lower the classification, or maybe replace the text with a few '#' to show were text was missing (but never a one-for-one character replacement). Then the released document is a little harder to crack.

Sorry, but in at least one of the cited examples, the methodology used requires an assumption that is false.

The proposed method depends on the calculated length of the missing word(s).

I believe that the "memo to George Bush" is the now infamous PDB of 8/6/03 (it was released in a PDF format). In this, the actual letters in the missing words were changed to nonsense characters (including non-alphanumeric symbiols) before the black box was drawn in. So the spaced taken up by the "redactions" have nothing to do (except by chance) with the length of the original words.

Its ok we can solve this by arresting the student and banning any software that does this. Just like we solved the Iraqi abuse problem by taking their cameras away, and how we solved the Berg murder by making sure no news outlet would publish or link to the video, and how we solved the terrorists hi-jacking planes and crashing them problem with iris and finger scanning, (so now they can still get on the plane, but when they've crashed it we will know who did it and not to let them on next time). Or maybe its more like how the CD copy-protection system being defeated by the shift-key problem was defeated by threatening the student under the DMCA! or could it be how the drug problem was totally solved by throwing half the population in jail? [insert something about DRM solving everything and letting governments send sensitive documents in full without having to worry about someone reading the bad words] great, so i guess we can bomb for peace and fuck for virginity after all:)

The title of this article sounds impressive, but the results are wishy-washy. It can only narrow down one missing word to maybe half a dozen possibilities. Who is to say the word is not North Korea instead of South Korea? And since most blackouts are several words long, it is not useful at all.

Are those documents redacted in the final photocopy, or are they redacted by hand (very expensive, but they're spending our money, after all)?

There are two simple solutions that go beyond and below high technology.

Unless they crank down the brightness as far as possible, most photocopiers put down a varying amount of toner to paper. A cloth soaked in, say, spirit solvents, when wiped across the page, will expose part, if not all, of the text. Similarly, this can be done with most magic marker inks.

During the reign of Pinochet, writer Ariel Dorfman used to convey the extent of the official censorship of
his articles by incorporating the censored sections as blacked-out text and photos, with the understanding
that people could fill in the blanks for themselves based on the surrounding text, knowing where the
blanks were.

Anyway this technique is easily foiled; just produce a document with randomly increased or shrink Blacked out boxes; or just subsitute all blacked out phrases with "***". Even if it's a photostat you can photoshop it.

So speaks some clueless twonk who didn't think through the technique at all. If it's a photostat then it will have all the text positioned based on the exact width of the word you want to hide - blacking out the word, no matter how much black you put on either side (even if it's right up to

But one thing to consider is whether redaction software does this at present. I don't believe that there is any such software. This story is informative in that it reveals that current redaction techniques may be inadequate.

I think you'd be surprized how much irrelevant 'intelligence' ends up classified. Often, it's stuff which is already public (although not always general) knowledge but which the administration wants to deny.A lot of ass-covering, basically.

But it gets even stranger. For instance the case of the de-classified CIA documents [gwu.edu] relating to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. (Whups, now there's a piece of flamebait..)

Anyway, a bunch of these documents have been re-classified by the current administration, apparently to hide such disturbing secrets like what Señor Pinochet's favorite drink was. (Scotch)

I found this on Yahoo News a while ago:
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) classified as "secret" and withheld from public dissemination for nearly 29 years a prank terrorist threat against Santa Claus, according to documents released.

The threat -- purported to come from a then- and still-unknown group calling itself the "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge" -- was contained in a classified compilation of intelligence on possible terrorist attacks produced by the CI